In the years to come it will not be hard to find yourself hauled in front of the Religious Inquisition Tribunal to evaluate the level of hate crime that you have committed due to expressing an opinion that you incorrectly held on a religion. That is surely the road that we are travelling along due to our own subservience to the ideology that is driving legislation and destroying long held liberties.

Throughout history peoples have wished to enshrine the right to freely express oneself: The Bill of Rights in the US, in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 and even the EU have pronounced in their Charter of Fundamental Rights, Article 11. All hold free speech to be an inalienable right. This is a liberty that we hold dear in this country as seen last week when the police protected a number of British Muslims who had chosen to demonstrate at an homecoming parade of the Royal Anglians in Luton. They were invoking their right to speak freely. However, they are hypocrites if they also support the announcements from the Organization of the Islamic Conference in seeking to criminalize the ‘defamation’ of religion.

Instituting this type of legislation would be a stricture upon advancing our world away from the Dark Ages where heretics were burned at the stake. Practising a religion is by extension a form of freedom of expression; where religion seeks to curtail this freedom for others, they will in time also suffer. The state will use its legitimate violence to breach religious practices it sees as abhorrent to its own ideology, then they may understand that freedom is a mutually beneficial status.